Category Archives: Writing

It’s a pretty stock tactic: present the young undergraduate students of Philosophy with the myth of Sisyphus, and tell them it’s an allegory for human existence. There’s a way to get their attention. There’s a way to get them thinking. Except it’s not. Because Sisyphus doesn’t work here anymore.

— Life Unfurnished

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that’s absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

— Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (tr. Manheim)

The ideological versatility of melancholia: an uncompromising rejection of the existent (nothing short of total transformation is tolerable) coupled with an easy accommodation to whatever happens to be the case (everything is equally terrible, so why bother…).

— via here

Now an angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a blazing fire —

a fire that devours fire;

a fire that burns in things dry and moist;

a fire that glows amid snow and ice;

a fire that is like a crouching lion;

a fire that reveals itself in many forms;

a fire that is, and never expires;

a fire that shines and roars;

a fire that blazes and sparkles;

a fire that flies in a storm wind;

a fire that burns without wood;

a fire that renews itself every day;

a fire that is not fanned by fire;

a fire that billows like palm branches;

a fire whose sparks are flashes of lightning;

a fire black as a raven;

a fire, curled, like the colours of the rainbow!

– Yannai, ‘The Celestial Fire’, from The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (via here)

There is an idea in Finland that it is good to sit in silence as the light goes, to observe nightfall as a time of contemplation – ‘pitaa hamaraa’, ‘keeping the twilight’.

– Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (via here)

Monks of certain orders are said to have slept in their coffins. Some sadhus are known to have allowed themselves to be buried alive for up to forty days. St James’ forehead and knees were hard as camel’s hoofs from praying. Origen castrated himself. John of the Cross prayed to ‘suffer and be despised’. St Rose of Lima disfigured her beautiful face with pepper and lye. You get drunk and watch sitcoms.

When you were young and jobless, you’d leave your flat and walk the streets like a ghost: it was their world, you were just passing through. You’d walk from pub to pub having a drink in each, you’d walk yourself into the ground so you could sleep. Back home, you’d stand at your window while you waited for the shower to warm up. The window gave on a slant of the river that wound through the town. You often stood watching it carry its grimy load seaward. Sometimes a kind of mental mist would steal over you. As evening fell, your reflection would appear in the window, slowly replacing the river. The more you examined it – those empty unblinking eyes, those straight lips – the harder it was to feel it was yours. It was a thing among things, untenanted, like a face watching you from the other bank.

The everyday is not exact, it is a cliché; realism requires vertiginous originality. But how can one be exact about what is truly unspeakable? One can only write knowing that one approaches and approximates, and that language fails you the while; you run after exactness, but the world gets away and your words fail. Beckett taught us about this failure because he knew failure and writing were synonymous.

— ReadySteadyBook

Wasn’t that your first lesson in anonymity, there in that room with nothing to do, with the endless hours stretching ahead of you? Wasn’t that when the other ‘you’ was first born, the you I’ve written so often about in the past? The you with the capital Y, I could call it, the You beyond us both. The Anonymous itself.

What happened when you got to your room? Wasn’t I being born then, like some deformed twin? Or were you being born as my deformed twin? A corridor flanked by rectangular dormitories, yours the last, the one facing the artificial lake. That uncanny Scandinavian silence you could never get used to, broken by sudden sounds and voices. The odd quick body stomping by, the women with their heels were the worst. Avoid the eyes. Get into the room, lock the door, make it safe. There are voices in the hall. I think I heard footsteps after mine. Did they see me? Are they talking about me? I can hear them. They’re laughing at me. You can still see each detail of that room, can’t you? The cupboard, the cot, the desk, the window. Hear the echoing voices in the hall, the noises echoing off the tiles in the shared bathrooms.